With
the boom of the Beta/VHS industry in the early 80's, there was a need
for lots of film product to fill video rental store shelves. Video
distributors filled the quota with cinema that either had a limited
theatrical release or were made straight-to-video. While this meant a
lot of titles for consumers to choose from, it was often a dice roll as
to level of quality. For every gem, there were ten films that were such mis-fires they were best left collecting dust bunnies on the shelf. One such dirt magnet is Twice Dead, a film replete with a two dollar budget, amateurish direction and even worse acting. (read more...)

By
all appearances, Vampire
Junction
looks to be just another addition in a tirelessly long line of
mediocre paperback fare that was spewed forth by both talented and
hack writers alike during the 1980s. It's hard to go into a tale
detailing the trials and tribulations of immortality with a straight
face when the cover to the book shows the powdered face of a young
boy (looking somewhat similar to Justin Bieber) singing his undead
heart out while wearing a velvet cape and baring his fangs. But
somehow author S. P. Somtow manages to downplay the ridiculous notion
of a vampiric teeny-bopper singer and delve into some fertile ground
that explores the deeper psychological themes surrounding the vampire
myth. (read more...)

What
does it mean to be human? The question turns out to be far more
interesting than the answer in Altered
States,
written by Paddy Chayefsky (Network)
and directed by Ken Russell (Tommy).
On a technical level, Altered
States
is a well-made "body horror" film, replete with some of Ken
Russell's finest psychedelic sequences, but ultimately the movie
fails to deliver satisfying answers to its own tantalizing questions
and a lapse into Hollywood-drenched heteronormativity in the final
act reduces an intellectually engrossing setup into a mundane
resolution.(read more...)

It's
a traditional criticism of the modern horror film that the world
represented is sexist in nature. It's a simplistic argument, but
one that a surface-level analysis of most horror films would confirm.
After all, don't most depict women in peril -- from Halloween
to The
Texas Chain SawMassacre
to Suspiria?
While it might seem like the most obvious of possible assessments,
what this criticism fails to recognize are the areas in which the
horror genre upends conventional depictions of women as
victims.(read more...)

Silent Night, Bloody Night is an
eerie and disturbing little proto-slasher. Filmed in 1972 and
arriving in 1974, it predates even Black Christmas, yet
features several elements that have become familiar today: the
holiday setting, the menacing phone calls, the nebulous identity of
the killer, the "final girl". At the same time, its Gothic-style
focus on the tragic history of a big, creepy house places it at the
intersection of classic and modern approaches to the horror genre. At
worst, it's a curiosity; at best, it's a forgotten minor classic.
(read more...)

One Halloween night when I was a
teenager a friend and I decided to walk to the cemetery a quarter
mile from my mom's apartment and wander around. It was pretty
spooky. The cemetery in question was huge, with a dead gnarled tree
near the entrance, and odd little stone steps - we imagined that
they were perhaps gateways to Hell - leading from the pathways to
the fields where hundreds of gravestones sprawled. One almost
expected to see Colin Clive and Dwight Frye skulking about with
shovel and lantern. Another friend of ours had declined to come. He
was quite religious, and what we were doing he found both offensive
and frightening, regarding it disrespectful of the dead and vaguely
"evil" as well. As the two of us got increasingly creeped out I
suggested that we should have forced the third guy to come with us -
if we were attacked by angry specters, I said, we could have
ritualistically sacrificed him to placate them.(read more...)

We're still a bit tired from our long month of covering all things Texas Chainsaw Massacre, so enjoy this guest review from The Uranium Cafe's Bill Dan Courtney.

By
the mid-1960s, American-International Pictures, once a struggling
outfit that churned out low-budget but profitable movies for drive-in
movie theaters, had become perhaps the most successful and powerful
of the independent film companies in Hollywood. A logical step it
seemed was to move into the now lucrative syndicated television
market and so AIP-TV was formed. One of the projects AIP-TV took on
was to remake a handful of AIP's earlier film and release them in
color to a new generation of movie viewers. They hired legendary
Z-movie shlockmeister Larry Buchanan, who made movies with a bare
minimum of money and talent, yet still managed to at least break even
if not turn a small profit. Buchanan produced eight films for AIP-TV
with his Azalea Pictures company based out of Dallas, Texas. Zontar: The Thing from Venus, a remake of Roger Corman's It Conquered the
World, is considered by many to be the best of his AIP-TV productions
and even has B-movie icon John Agar in the role played by Peter
Graves in the original film. Of course one can hardly say that the
best Larry Buchanan film is anything that is going to excite the
masses; they are films for the cognoscenti of camp and cheese only
and rise to the quality of an Al Adamson movie at best.(read more...)

Texas Chainsaw Massacre Month. I was a late bloomer in my appreciation of horror cinema. Aside from sporadic outings to see mass-market horror films, I did not discover the true joys of the genre until I was in college. As I journeyed through classics like Alien, Halloween, and Rosemary's Baby, I was occasionally frightened or unsettled in various ways, but it was all enjoyable horror, the kind that can be intense but that ultimately leaves the psyche unscarred. Then I saw The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. As I watched this film, a deep-seated, almost unidentifiable anxiety began to build within me from the opening scenes - scenes which contain very little horror. Then, as I watched the characters experience physical and psychological torment later in the film, that building anxiety exploded into outright dismay. I was so disturbed by this movie that it would be six years before I watched it again, and even then it retained a potent effect. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is not so much creative in its approach to instilling horror as it is merciless, breaking down viewers' defenses before hitting them on all sides with unimaginable terror. This is one of the most horrifying films ever made.(read more...)

Texas Chainsaw Massacre Month. When you're thinking about something all the time, as we have been thinking about The Texas Chainsaw Massacre series this month, you start seeing it everywhere. I started noticing a lot more Texas Chainsaw related videos on Youtube lately. They've always been there, I guess, but they were just waiting for me to notice them. Most of them were, frankly, awful, but I picked a smattering that amused me, along with trailers for all six Texas Chainsaw films. You can view what I came up with after the cut.

Texas Chainsaw Massacre Month. Last year at the International Horror and Sci-Fi Film Festival in Phoenix, I had the great opportunity to chat with Marilyn Burns, who played final girl Sally Hardesty in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Our talk focused exclusively on her career in the 1970s and resulted in some great stories about the Texas film industry, the dangers of making a Charles Manson biopic, and why Eaten Alive may not be the film to take home to mother and father.(read more...)